Brian Ihnat of Edmond worked in the golf industry for 40 years in various capacities. A PGA Golf professional, he served as general manager at Edmond's Oak Tree Country Club.
In the back of his mind, though, he always had a dream.
"I always wanted to own my own company and work for myself. When I left the golf business, I didn't want to move since we love the area and our kids and grandkids live here," he said.
"I was looking for a franchise to purchase and found Lifestyle Publications. The more I looked into Lifestyle, the more I liked the concept and decided to start OKC Lifestyle."
Ihnat wanted OKC Lifestyle can feature some of the great things about the Oklahoma City community. Since its first issue three years ago, the magazine has featured stories from the Governor and Mayor and local charities to stories about the fun and unique activities, local merchants and neighborhoods in Oklahoma City.
"I hope that our readers get a unique perspective of OKC from the publication.," he said. "We feature a lot of home architecture and decorating ideas along with travel and many other features that we hope our readers find informative and entertaining."
OKC Lifestyle is direct mailed to a specific target market. It is not put in racks and is not subscription-based, so the distribution is laser-sighted upon a specific market in the city. As for the future, Ihnat sees only growth.
"I would love to see OKC Lifestyle grow to 50-60 pages which would allow us to feature a larger variety of stories," Ihnat said. "We love to feature some of the awesome charities that operate in the OKC metro, travel features, our local merchants, and more, and adding more pages would allow us to feature of them."
